What is the most expensive Dutch city to buy a home, and the cheapest?

Ask where the most expensive place to buy a home in the Netherlands is, and most people say Amsterdam. They are close, but not right. Across the 17 cities we cover, homes sold for the most in Amstelveen in 2025, at an average of about €682k, ahead of Amsterdam at €631k. The cheapest was Groningen, at about €397k, a gap of roughly €285k. The national average was €479,527.

The full ranking, most to least expensive

The first column is the average price private buyers paid for an existing home in 2025, from Statistics Netherlands. The second is the average WOZ value, the official valuation the municipality uses for property tax. Both come from official open data.

8 of the 17 cities sit above the national average and 9 below it. The top four are the same on both measures, in the same order, so the ranking does not depend on which figure you use. Lower down the two columns shuffle a little, because the sale price only counts the homes that changed hands that year.

What is the average house price in the Netherlands?

In 2025 the average existing home in the Netherlands sold for €479,527, against €450,985 in 2024. Statistics Netherlands warns that this average is not a measure of price growth on its own: it reflects which homes happened to be sold, and a year with more large houses on the market pushes it up even if prices stand still.

The average WOZ value is lower, about €398k nationally. It covers every home, including rented ones that rarely come up for sale, and it is set on a reference date before the tax year, so it trails the market. For a buying budget, the sale price is the figure to use; the WOZ value is useful to compare neighbourhoods on the same basis.

Why Amstelveen, not Amsterdam, sits at the top

Amstelveen leads by about €51k per home. The difference is mostly what is for sale. About 48 percent of Amstelveen's homes are single-family houses, against 12 percent in Amsterdam, and houses usually sell for more than flats.

Amsterdam's average is held down by that same mix. About 69 percent of its homes are rented rather than owned, and 88 percent are flats or other multi-family homes. Haarlem and Utrecht, where 48 and 41 percent of homes are houses, follow close behind at €577k and €549k.

Groningen is the cheapest place to buy, Rotterdam the cheapest of the big four

At the other end, Groningen at €397k, Arnhem at €407k and Maastricht at €414k are the cheapest places to buy. All three sit well outside the Randstad, the ring of big cities in the west of the country.

Among the four largest cities, Rotterdam is the cheapest at €415k, about €216k below Amsterdam. The Hague sits in between at €465k. City size says little about price: Rotterdam, the second-largest city in the country, is cheaper to buy into than Almere, Leiden or Breda.

Cheapest to buy is not cheapest to rent

The order changes once you rent instead of buy. Amsterdam carries the steepest asking rents of the 17, around €1,961 to €2,506 a month for a reference one-bedroom flat of 60 m². The cheapest cities to buy do not read as the cheapest to rent: student demand pushes up the rent per square metre in university cities, a quirk we flag on our data sources page.

The gap reflects who competes for what. Buying prices are set by families and long-term owners, while rents are driven by students and new arrivals chasing a smaller pool of flats. That is why even the three cheapest cities to buy post open-market rents from roughly €1,448 a month upward.

What a city average does and does not tell you

These are citywide averages, so they hide the spread inside each city. A single neighbourhood can sit well above or below its city, which is why the national €480k is only a starting point. Use the city figure to build a shortlist, then look at the neighbourhood level before you decide.

You can sort every city and neighbourhood yourself in the explorer, open a city to see its breakdown, or read how the cities compare on more than price. All figures here come from the public sources listed on our data sources page.

A note on the city figures. The numbers in this article are the published municipal figures, covering every address in the municipality. The neighbourhood scores elsewhere on PlanetExpat are built differently on purpose. They count only residential areas, leaving out ports, business parks, cemeteries and parks, and they weight each neighbourhood by how many people live there. That is the right basis for deciding where to live, but it does mean a city figure here and a city figure on a city page are not the same measurement. Both are explained on our data sources page.